Degeneration Gap 
Andreas Huyssen
- The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War by David Caute Buy this book
The struggle for cultural supremacy between the Soviet Union and the United States began as soon as Nazi Germany was defeated. Waged primarily in Europe, it came to an end decades before the Soviet Union collapsed. Inside the Soviet Union, cultural and scholarly contact with the West slowly but steadily eroded the ideological cohesiveness of the Soviet elites and by the time The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West in the mid-1970s, Soviet Communism had already lost what little intellectual cachet it had left in Europe.
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From the LRB letters page: [ 18 November 2004 ] Ian Johnston.
Andreas Huyssen, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia, is a founding editor of New German Critique and the author, most recently, of Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory.
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